XKCD is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between April 30, 2021 and May 30, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "any rationality blog post must include an XKCD comic"; "Obligatory xkcd ( source )"; "https://xkcd.com/882/ . This, with the results being absurd". It most often appears alongside American, COVID, Eliezer.
- Article page
- XKCD
- Mention count
- 7
- Issue count
- 7
- First seen
- April 30, 2021
- Last seen
- May 30, 2025
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
It is also a truth universally acknowledged that any rationality blog post must include an XKCD comic. A friend of mine who works in politics thinks there’s a third kind of archetype we seem to be missing in the Wizard/Prophet dichotomy – something like the "Engineer" who can tinker with complex, semi-broken systems using a mix of Wizardly tools (science, technology, RCTs) and Prophetic ones (grass-roots activism, behavioral and cultural change) to get them retuned and producing better long term outputs. Another in academia thinks genetically engineering everyone to be smarter is the only way to make real progress on the thornier, hairier systemic problems. Half the people I know in the Bay Area are convinced that democratic socialism is the true path forward; the other half are pretty sure that AI will eventually, not-too-distantly-from-now destroy everything, so other kinds of long term systems tinkering probably aren’t even worth worrying about. (It’s interesting to me that the realm of AI research is populated by highly educated, technocratic Wizard types, but while its tenor may have started out very Wizardly, it is now extremely Prophetic.)
Obligatory xkcd (source) There’s this weird trap a lot of adults fall into where anything a kid does on their own, however interesting, is “wasting away”, and anything they do at school, however ridiculous, is Exciting Prosocial Learning Fun Glowing Childhood Memories. I think this might be entirely a function of whether the parents can spectate and take pictures that look good on a mantlepiece: easy with hobbyhorsing, harder with learning C++.
Inline links: source
This is interesting, but I’m a bit concerned that he chose only 6 outcomes to measure https://xkcd.com/882/. This, with the results being absurd, makes me skeptical of the results.
Inline links: https://xkcd.com/882/
First, the 6 illnesses seem, a priori, pretty relevant. Will the exception of pediatric ALL (which is useful because it is a non-adult condition that relies on specialists for delivery), these are all extremely common conditions. While the xkcd comic is very funny (they always are), I don't know that it's relevant here? They're not cherry picking a small feature of a bigger phenomena and then claiming that that cherry picked thing is driving the whole phenomenon; rather they're using some representative conditions to try to understand ways in which healthcare in the US may be surprising.
Source: XKCD (source: SMBC) How seriously should we take these comics? The worse chatbots are (compared to humans) as friends, influencers, and debate partners, the less we have to worry about. But the better chatbots are as friends, influencers, and debate partners, the more upside there could be. I don’t want to speculate on exactly how this would work: it gets too close to the original idea of the Singularity in the sense of “a point where crazy things are happening so fast it’s not worth trying to predict”. Conclusion And Predictions I’m nervous writing this, because I remember the halcyon days of the early 2000s, when we all assumed the Internet would be a force for reason and enlightenment. Surely if everyone were just allowed to debate everyone else, without intervening barriers of race or class or religion, the best arguments would rise to the top and we would enter a new utopia of universal agreement. The scale at which this project failed makes me reluctant to ever speculate again about anything regarding online discourse going well. Maybe in the 2030s, the idea that propagandabots would be either easily dispatched, or else model netizens writing good content, will seem just as naive as the early 2000s vision. And the chatbot propaganda apocalypse is a popular thing to believe in without any clear definition, and there will surely be some celebrated cases of chatbots causing mischief, so I’m setting myself up to fail here by the standards I mentioned in Nostradamus to Fukuyama. Still, I do want to go on record as doubting the strongest form of this thesis. As for predictions: If I ask ACXers in 2030 whether any of them have had a good friend for more than a month who turned out to (unknown to them) be a chatbot, or who they strongly suspect may have been a chatbot, fewer than 10% will say yes. I may resolve this by common sense if it’s obvious, or by ACX survey if it’s not: 95%
FIRE: Ah, the old XKCD trick: extra credit in a Turing Test for convincing the interviewer that they’re an AI. Is that a real rule? I can’t remember.
MANN: You don’t get extra credit by convincing me I’m not real! That was just a gag on XKCD!
This week’s XKCD is surprisingly relevant. My concern is that people read books like this, correctly intuit that there’s something wrong with the author, and then apply that to polyamorous people in general.
Inline links: This week’s XKCD